Accelerated Psychedelia: Dyad For PC

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Shawn McGrath sends word that his breath-taking psychedelic whizzy particle-accelerating game, Dyad, will be heading for the PC (and thereafter Mac and Linux) around March. The game, which is set in “a reactive audio-visual tube creating a harmonious synthesis of color and sound” caused a stir of hippie-noises, gamer awe, and wide-eyed cooing when it was released on PSN, so there’s good reason to suspect that it’ll intoxicating a few of us in the coming months. McGrath says that he prefers using the keyboard to the gamepad on the Windows version, which is a good sign, and that he’ll be supporting that Steam Big Picture doohickey. So that’s reassuring, too.

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Dyad is lovely. Played it to death on the PS3, and I recommend you all jump on it when it hits the PC if you’ve ever enjoyed a game by Jeff Minter. It has that same mix of mind-altering synaesthesia combined with a really interesting pile of gameplay challenges.

It confirms that the leaks were actually real things that were found on Steam by data miners, but it doesn’t necessarily confirm any of the games in the leak are coming to Steam. As I understand it, this leak has about the same veracity as publishers hoovering up domain names. Shawn McGrath could just as easily have run a “no comment” line until he was ready to officially announce it — and the developers of other obviously real things may do just that — but I guess McGrath decided that he’d rather not beat around the bush.

Oh, I agree with you not all of these are coming, microsoft has denied Halo is coming to steam. Also his acknowledgement wasn’t the first thing that confirmed this data mining, most of the games found had hub pages and official groups, which are two things that can only be made by steam.

They weren’t leaks or hacks, it’s Valves open CDR database, anyone can look up appids on there.. How do people still not know about this?!

As for the ‘confirmation’, Valve have hinted several times that they’re aware of sensationalist games sites using the db to drive traffic/click revenue & so began posting false appids to point out their stupidity for trying to use it as a valid source.

He’s rather genuine, isn’t he? Which is weird to say about anybody because people are themselves a lot of the time. I suppose a better fitting word escapes me at the moment. I blame my foreignerosity. Foreignerhood? Unbritishness?

If I were a single particle in the LHC, I would aside from having no conciousness, probably be all like “WEEEEE!! Class of Hadron Epoch 4eva!” followed by a “THUMP-SHHHHH!” as I fell apart into my constituent elementary particles, for science.

If you like the look of this, I would urge you to check out Digital Eel’s Brainpipe (I’ve linked to a decent short review, but note that game is actually silky-smooth, not at all like the poor frame-rate on display in the accompanying video).

Dyad is clearly a different game, but there are some definite similarities that made me think of Digital Eel’s game; and while I can’t comment on the new game, I can vouch wholeheartedly for Brainpipe.

The game has you flying through your own mind, avoiding harmful obstacles, and collecting glyphs for extra points. The graphics are neat (if difficult to make sense of in static screenshots), the gameplay is smooth, and the soundtrack is superb, constantly throwing strange little ‘memories’ out at you. As with most Digital Eel games, things are randomised so that the game never gets old.

You can pick up and play for just a few minutes, start on any level, try for a maximum 100 glyphs in a single game, or try for the highest possible score. It starts out very relaxing, but really ramps up the intensity as the levels go by, and it’s one of those games that can keep you coming back for a long long time, even though it doesn’t seem like there’s very much to it.